mamslyth filled out a meme that asks to describe five of userpics, what they are and why they're used. Comment and i'll pick five of yours to explain which you can do in a comment or in your own post.

- right around the five year anniversary of my LJ i changed my default icon (and the look of my LJ) for the first time since i started one. the icon is a loose representation of me and what is important to me - on the surface it's supposed to show how musical endeavors is still of central core importance to me. Beneath the sruface, it's a statement of how i conceive of music (and the way i perceive life in general) as necessarily including a small degree of deliberate chaos and abstraction to complement that which is graspable, and to never see things as strictly black or white.

- this is a stock set of yamaha tenors. it's what i played for a good seven years of my life starting with a dinky set of trip-toms as a sophomore in high school up through playing quints and hex sets at West Chester and with the Crossmen. When i teach drum lines, i typically like to put my strongest players in the tenor line. Even though i have more interest in bass drumming and cymbal playing, i still have my roots in tenor drumming. I wrote a piece for tenors and balinese gamelan in 2000 and have a performance of it on my youtube channel.

- a picture of vash the stampede and nicholas wolfwood from the anime Trigun. Sometimes i consider my personality to be a loose combination of these two characters, or at least when watching the anime i found a lot of similarities and empathy with them.

- One of the more succesful pieces of music i wrote in my masters degree was called "Remembrance" for alto voice, vibraphone, and piano. The climax of that piece ranks as one of the best climaxes i've written in my music career. i put the piece on youtube if you're interested.

- this icon is something i developed for my old alternote project that i ended up abandoning because i no longer had the time to do it. Which is a shame, because i had mapped out in my head how the character's life was going to evolve over a period of 6-8 months in terms of work, school, love life, etc.

*stretch* the last couple of days have been annoyingly non-productive in terms of creative projects. I may go to the vietnam restaurant with a pad of music paper and a pencil, and try to sketch out some ideas over a nice bowl of pho.